The last time I wrote about the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni metadrama, my take was a typically middle-of-the-road, above-the-fray admonishment to look at the big picture.

My thesis was that the saga was so interesting because it cast us - web dwellers in the cheap seats - as judge, jury, and [career] executioner. One of the last things I said in that piece was effectively, “we’ll see what happens when the other shoe drops.”

Well, it’s dropped. And now this is a whole new kettle of trout.

Before, I was vacillating. I read Blake Lively’s complaint to the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) and was revolted by what appeared to be Justin Baldoni’s disgusting on-set behavior. Then I read the previews of what would become Baldoni’s haymaker of a counterpunch and started to doubt Lively’s version.

It was shaping up to be a real head scratcher of a he said/she said.

Then, a few weeks ago, Baldoni and his legal team released, as promised, a website featuring not just his own lawsuit, but a studiosly documented timeline of the events in question, replete with a treasure trove of personal texts between the stars at the center of the scandal.

And holy s**t, guys.

This isn’t a he said/she said at all anymore. It’s a he said/he can prove it. Because he has receipts.

This writer now also feels like a moron who can’t update his thinking. Here was, I thought, yet another example of a shitty, media man making life unpleasant and icky for the women in his orbit. It was supposed to be a near-impossible rarity for an accusation like Lively’s to be revealed as weaponized horseshit, but that now seems to be exactly what it was.

Just to play it safe, I’ll offer the same disclaimer I did last time: lawyers are paid to make their clients look good and their opponents look bad. Baldoni’s website is a masterful example of this. Justin Baldoni comes across as the most innocent victim ever to be victimized by anyone, and Blake Lively comes across as a deceitful witch from actual Hell.

This is obviously the website’s intention, so we need to exercise a modicum of caution before swallowing the hook, line, and sinker all in one gulp here.

But the receipts, man. The receipts.

Lively’s lawsuit didn’t really have those (and as we’ll see, what ones it did have lacked important context). Baldoni’s timeline appears to have Lively dead to rights.

Her husband too (yes, I’m afraid I am here to ruin Ryan Reynolds for you, and trust me, I’m as disappointed about it as you are).

So without further throat clearing, I present you with:

Blake vs. Justin - Part II: A Drama In Five Acts

Act I - Bosom Buddies

I’m going to try to avoid quoting extensively from the emails and texts that support the key events in Baldoni’s timeline. There’s really no reason for me to, since you can go read all of them yourself for free. I’ll caution that it is a deep rabbit hole - it’ll be several hours out of your life, anyway - but it’s worth at least skimming the document just to get a sense of how it works.

Baldoni’s legal team has laid out a comprehensive sequence of the events that led up to (and were featured in) Blake Lively’s CRD complaint. For each major plot point, the receipts are posted just below. So when Baldoni and Lively are described as having had a pleasant conversation via text message, you can read the conversation itself just after reading about it.

It’s important to remember that Baldoni and his squad are fighting a war on many fronts. Each act of our drama will serve as a counteroffensive on a specific one of them. Act I, which is, in a lot of ways, the juiciest, serves as a refutation of Lively’s explosive allegations that Baldoni and Jamey Heath, his partner at Wayfarer Studios, sexually harassed her.

Outside of Act I though, the sexual harassment is almost an aside in this yarn. It’s more of a subplot than the main story, which is much more about: creative control and promotion of a major motion picture, a trek through the muddy swamp of professional public relations, and a $¼ billion lawsuit against America’s paper of record.

In Act I, Lively and Baldoni are great friends, excited to be working with each other, and excited about the work they’re doing. Baldoni clearly understands that this is his big break, and is thrilled to have landed an A-lister like Lively to star in his project. Lively seems genuinely excited to be on the team, and the pair get chummy to the point of being kind of saccharine.

They swap novel-length texts gushing about how wonderful the other is. They crack jokes, they banter, they stay up late, they talk obsessively about the project, they even come pretty close to flirting (though nothing Baldoni released crosses any real fidelity lines - both are married).

These two people are fast friends, and clearly enjoy a strong professional partnership. You could imagine Matt Damon and Ben Affleck texting each other like this during production of Good Will Hunting (if texting had been a thing at that time, and if Damon and Affleck were big, gooey mush-balls).

There’s not a smidge of disagreement or rancor. It’s sort of the opposite. Baldoni can’t believe his good fortune in having an actor of Lively’s stature on board, and he bends over backward to accommodate her at every turn. None of what Lively wants is unreasonable at this stage, and she appears to love every inch of the art they’re creating together.

Lively’s sick? OMG, take all the time you need to recover, I hope you’re okay, and here’s my personal holistic health coach, at your service.

Lively is given time off for family: OMG thank you sooooo much.

Lively has an idea about a scene? OMG I loooooovve it.

Baldoni finished a scene? OMG you were soooooooo amazing.

Lively feels insecure about her looks? OMG you are perrrrrrrrfect. Don’t worry about one single thing.

It goes on like this. And on. And on. It’s kind of gross actually. Through most of Act I, the pair are contorting themselves into pretzels to kiss the other one’s ass.

What’s most significant though is that a number of events that took place during this period would ultimately be covered in Lively’s CRD complaint, but with a wildly different spin.

The holistic health coach, for example, was later reimagined as a weight-loss specialist deployed to “fat-shame” Lively. This is hard to countenance in context. While Lively’s CRD complaint offered no glimpse of them, all of Baldoni’s texts to Lively that addressed her weight and appearance were…whatever the literal, exact opposite of “fat-shaming” is.

Another of Lively’s complaints would be that Baldoni used the word “sexy” in reference to her while discussing her wardrobe for a particular scene. Lively would go on to say that this made her feel “ogled and exposed.”

But their surrounding exchanges make it pretty darn clear that this was part of a broader discussion about Lively’s worries over her wardrobe in general. Namely, that it was insufficiently “sexy” (a word she used first in messages to Baldoni). So to regard this as anything other than a director following up on a previously voiced concern seems a real stretch.

Bottom line, is it possible that Baldoni overstepped his mark on occasion? Sure, I guess. Their texts to one another don’t prove he didn’t (though they do expose some major distortions and omissions on Lively’s part). But Lively offers nothing to back up any of what she’s alleging.

The New York Times would end up trying to on her behalf. But the closest their piece - which is now the focus of Baldoni’s lawsuit (more later) - came was another context-free snippet between Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, two of Baldoni’s PR hands. In it, Nathan writes, “He doesn’t know how lucky he is right now.”

This was in reference to Lively’s allegation that Baldoni had ad-libbed an unscripted kiss/grope in front of witnesses. At face value, it looks like the PR team expressing relief that Baldoni had gotten away with his bad behavior. Thought the rest of their internal communication spells out plainly that they a) didn’t believe Lively, b) regarded *The Truth* as Bladoni’s single most powerful defensive weapon, and c) were only relieved because both of them knew how potent an accusation like that, even a false one, could be.

Act I of this saga seriously pushes the limits of the “no such thing as a perfect victim” excuse, which is reliably trotted out anytime a public allegation looks to have major holes in it. Was Lively being sexually harassed by her co-star? She sure as hell wasn’t acting like it. But we aren’t supposed to trust our instincts on that, or our own lying eyes. Maybe she was just an imperfect victim. Whatever really happened though, no fair reading of these exchanges would cause any neutral party to conclude that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were anything more than friendly colleagues on great terms with one another.

Until they weren’t.

Act II - Trouble In Paradise

The line between Act I and Act II of our story is a very blurry one. To the extent we have an inciting incident, it’s probably an April 12th, 2023 meeting at Lively and Reynold’s NYC penthouse during which Baldoni is shown Lively’s rewrites of the movie’s iconic “rooftop scene.” Baldoni’s first serious misstep appears to have been waiting an unacceptable period of time before expressing his adoration for Lively’s edits. Lively sends him a long, rambling, weirdo message afterwards that could, kinda/sorta be read as a threat but is mostly just cringe.

In it, Lively compares herself to Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones and references her “few dragons” (understood to be her husband, Ryan Reynolds and Lively’s bestie, popstar Taylor Swift). Whether this actually was a threat or just Lively being weird, Baldoni gets the message and promptly falls all over himself to praise her and thank her for her wonderful work.

Act II is long, but it’s worth following in full. You should go read it all. It takes what felt like an ancillary issue in the first rounds of reporting on this and places it front and center; Lively’s gradual but complete theft of Baldoni’s film. A slow-motion steal, happening right in front of his face.

Lively and Baldoni were, at surface level, still on good terms. But bit by bit, piece by piece, Lively was assuming control. She’d already caused budget-busting delays in the schedule, had already catastrophically overspent on wardrobe, and was now making serious (and bizarre) demands that had to be complied with in order for her to agree to finish shooting.

We have multiple perspectives here. Not just Lively and Baldoni’s exchanges with each other, but an increasingly worried production team trying to come to terms with what Lively was doing, and trying to figure out how to counter it. At every stage, they came to the reluctant conclusion that what they could do was…sweet f**k all.

Lively held all the cards. They couldn’t afford her causing any more delays to filming, if she walked from the project, they were screwed, and if she failed to promote the project (as she would threaten to do multiple times) they were equally screwed.

I don’t think any commentator or observer realized how serious this actually was until Justin Baldoni launched his website. Lively was sidestepping editors, getting assistant directors fired, dodging the intimacy coordinator, and generally terrorizing the production staff. She demanded access to the raw footage they’d shot, and forced a renegotiation of her contract that allowed her, with editors of her own choosing, to make an entirely new cut of the film.

When Baldoni’s director cut screen-tested better with the film’s target demographic, it didn’t matter. Lively wanted her version in theaters and threatened to sink the whole ship if she didn’t get her way. Baldoni is still credited as the film’s director, but the version that made it before audiences was only partly his work.

And again, he could do nothing. He just had to take the punches. When Lively started shutting him out of the film’s promotion and press events, same thing. Wayfarer Studios really had no recourse. They were in too deep, and Lively had too much clout, especially when she started wielding her uber-famous husband as a kind of gladiator to beat Wayfarer into submission. Baldoni was trapped. He had no choice but to ride it out, hoping that audiences would like what they saw anyway and that all would be well.

The key takeaway from Act II is that Lively’s control needs were very real, and her takeover of the film, total. Her initial complaint made it appear that accusations of her being an overbearing diva were fundamentally retaliatory, i.e. that Baldoni had just concocted this narrative to make her seem like a b***h after she accused him of misconduct. But the receipts make clear that that causation is wrong. Lively was already wresting control of Baldoni’s passion project away from him before the more serious allegations were ever given voice.

In a typical he said/she said situation, one of the things investigators - professional and amateur alike - look for is whether the accusations are backed up by what the accuser was saying to others at the time the events supposedly took place. So a person claiming to have been the victim of an assault is more likely to be believed if they can show that they mentioned the assault to friends and family around the time it happened. In this case, Justin Baldoni and his team were openly fretting about this, all the while it was taking place, even when his texts to Lively were still friendly. If he’s lying about Lively’s takeover of the film, the lie had a very elaborate setup.

Act III - Public Relations & Inside Baseball

Act III of our tragedy is boring but important. Remember that the crux of Lively’s CRD complaint, and the charge in Meghan Twohey’s explosive New York Times article, was that Baldoni and his hired hands orchestrated a “smear campaign” intended to destroy Blake Lively’s reputation. The receipts here largely consign that claim to the slag heap.

Some necessary backstory:

Wayfarer Studios had contracted a PR outfit called Jonesworks to help them through the production process. Jonesworks, for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with either Blake Lively or Justin Baldoni, was in the midst of significant internal turmoil. A spat between Jennifer Abel, who’d been dispatched to handle the Wayfarer account, and Stephanie Jones, the Jonesworks boss, boiled over until Abel tendered her resignation, effective at the end of the contract. From this point on, Stephanie Jones was mostly sidelined, and Jennifer Abel became the main PR contact working with Wayfarer.

Jones emerges as something of a villain in this act, and her “erratic,” “hostile” behavior became important when she broke a fragile ceasefire around the time of the film’s release. At that point, Lively’s takeover was complete, Baldoni was relegated to the sidelines and Wayfarer’s only concern was getting film through its first few weekends without a media shitstorm. Jones, not having been much of a presence until now, fired a very unhelpful shot into the opposing camp, then complained bitterly about her own sidelining when the Wayfarer team got mad at her.

The point is, the escalation of hostilities during this period was not the fault of Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, or anyone working closely with them. Rather, it was one rogue idiot from his PR team acting unilaterally without being clued into the wider strategy. The supporting documents in this chapter all emphasize how much Baldoni and Wayfarer didn’t want things going to the next level, and were doing something like the opposite of conducting a “smear campaign.”

At several points (more on this in the next chapter) Lively started getting bad press - referred to as “organic” throughout the timeline (meaning, not the result of PR hacks planting stories). Baldoni checked in with the Jonesworks people repeatedly to make sure they weren’t the ones orchestrating it all (they weren’t, according to what he was told).

In fact, it all became kind of an inside joke. Baldoni had recently hired Melissa Nathan, of The Agency Group PR (TAG) - a dedicated crisis management firm famous for having represented Johnny Depp. Their strategy was defensive and preparatory: they wanted to be ready to go in case Lively/Reynolds went nuclear. But until that time, they were carefully holding their fire. Lively, helpfully, kept doing their work for them by putting her foot in it (again, more in Act IV).

Lively’s CRD complaint has Jennifer Abel saying to Melissa Nathan, “He [Baldoni] wants to feel like she [Lively] can be buried,” and Nathan responding, “You know we can bury anyone.” Nathan’s ominous reply actually made it into the New York Times’s headline when they wrote about this. Ouch. Caught red handed, right?

Well, not really, as the context demonstrates. Yes, TAG was compiling what, in politics, we’d call “opposition research.” That’s what they’d been hired to do. If Lively turned the big guns on their client, they were prepared to discredit her. But the name of the game at this stage was deescalation, and trying to hold the truce. They could bury Lively, yes. But they were trying very hard not to have to. There was too much risk of an open battle hurting the film, and losing everyone money.

In fact, every supposedly incriminating quote reprinted by the New York Times to bolster their “smear” narrative has this dynamic attached. The spinmeisters are preparing for a media war, but it’s a war they’d rather not have to actually fight.

After the “We can bury anyone comment,” we also get, from Nathan, “...but you know when we send over documents, we can’t send over the work we will or could do because that would get us in a lot of trouble. We can’t write we will destroy her.”

Okay, quick piece of advice here: anytime you find yourself typing the words, “We can’t write…” stop writing! Whoever said, “Don’t type anything you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing printed in the New York Times,” was onto something. Actually don’t.

But check the grammar. “Can.” “Will.” “Could.” All of the really *bad* quotes are written like this. Future tense. Subjunctive mood. Hypotheticals. They were gearing up, not launching an offensive.

Anyway, in Baldoni’s version - backed up by multiple receipts - Stephanie Jones made a hamfisted attempt to reinsert herself and reestablish control over her agency’s relationship with Wayfarer Studios. She contacted a reporter from the Daily Mail after having been specifically asked to stay out of it, and it threatened to massively heighten the tensions.

Basically, she was that old archer on the wall at Helms Deep who let go of his bowstring and shot his wad too early.

Anyway, after one round of especially bad press for Lively, Abel joked via text to Nathan, “You really outdid yourself with this piece 🙃,” and Nathan responded, “That’s why you hired me right? I’m the best.”

In Lively’s complaint, the little upside-down face emoji at the end of Abel’s text was omitted. It’s a small thing, but without it, it looks like two spin doctors cavorting over trying to ruin an innocent starlet. With it, it makes pretty clear that they were having a laugh in celebration of organically bad press for their opponent.

Many of the quotes in Lively’s complaint, and in Twohey’s piece, have a similar extra-contextual meaning. On their own, they’re damning. But if you see what else the players were saying to each other at the time, they become pretty innocuous.

Act IV - The Promotion

A short act here, but another significant one. Central to Lively’s complaint was the charge that Baldoni and The Agency Group were orchestrating a press and social media campaign to destroy her. As Baldoni’s supporting documents make clear though, Lively was doing this damage to herself, without any assistance from the other side.

After having already pushed Baldoni out of the film’s promotion (the chronology is vital to understand here) Lively and her team set up a series of misguided, tone deaf promotional events to try to sell the picture. Baldoni and Wayfarer had always been careful to play up the domestic abuse angle, and to treat the marketing with the appropriate reverence. Lively didn’t follow suit.

Instead of solemnity, Lively & co projected a cutesy, fun-loving vibe, staging press events that featured the gang making floral arrangements (Lively’s character in the film is a florist), sewing patches onto clothing (???), and encouraging fans of the book to bring their friends to the movie and “wear their florals.”

It didn’t go over well.

Lively had already been getting shaky press after a series of bizarre, somewhat combative interviews, and this didn’t help. DV survivors spoke out, expressing their disappointment and feelings of having been let down. It escalated, and one has to think that Baldoni would’ve been loving it all, were it not for this unfortunate narrative’s potential to hurt the film’s performance in cinemas.

Rather than take victory laps, Baldoni, after ensuring that his own PR squad wasn’t responsible for the bad press, took to Sony, the film’s distributor, to voice his concerns about the discordant attempts to promote it. This is all time stamped, so we can clearly see that Baldoni was alert to the problem, and reaching out to correct it, days before it fully landed on Lively’s radar

This would not stop Lively from ultimately blaming Baldoni for the bad tone of the marketing.

In one of the saga’s weirdest episodes, Lively and Reynolds - who were no longer on speaking terms with Baldoni - tried to force him to accept blame for the poor promotional tactics by drafting a letter on his behalf that put the responsibility squarely on him. They then tried to strongarm him into signing it (Baldoni refused).

It represents a shocking twist in the story by the time we learn about this, because by this point, Baldoni and his lawyers have already walked us through the downright sociopathic ways in which Lively and Reynolds had attempted to screw this poor guy, and the extent to which he’d just rolled over for it. After all that, they wanted him to eat extra s**t for decisions they literally hadn’t even allowed him to make?

Act V - Meet the Press

The film did well, and after its first few weeks in theaters, everything seemed to die down. The peace was illusory though. Things had just gone dormant. Because Megan Twohey of the New York Times (the legendary #metoo reporter responsible for taking down Harvey Weinstein) was working on an exposé.

I don’t know a thing about libel cases except that they’re very hard to win in court. Baldoni is alleging journalistic malpractice to the tune of $250 million, which struck me as insane when I first read it. But whether or not a court will agree, Baldoni’s moral case against the Times seems strong. It really does look like Twohey uncritically accepted Lively’s version of events, set out to help her crush Baldoni, and paid grossly insufficient attention to what would have been exculpatory information casting Baldoni in a less nefarious light.

I’m well outside my wheelhouse here. I don’t know enough about the law, journalistic ethics, or IT to know whether Twohey or the Times are in actual trouble. But my layman’s opinion on this is that, whatever the ultimate ramifications, what the Times did to Justin Baldoni in this case was…a really shitty thing to do.

On the morning of December 21st, two hours before the deadline they’d given Wayfarer Studios to offer comment, Twohey’s piece went live, along with the full text of Blake Lively’s CRD complaint. It was a Christmas bombshell of epic proportions. Lively would follow the NYT’s salvo with another lawsuit filed in federal court specifically addressing the sexual harassment complaints.

Justin Baldoni looked pretty well cooked. His agency dropped him as a client, talk of his “cancellation” was swirling hard, and career recovery felt impossible. But you’ll recall that Lively’s reputation was imperfect, irrespective of how Hollywood bigwigs were going to react. Power-agent, Ari Emannuel, just the other day, went on a podcast bragging about having been the guy to drop the ax on Baldoni (or, “Bologna,” as he hilariously called him). Anyway, the mob stopped short of sharpening the pitchforks on Blake’s behalf. The torches were not immediately fired.

As Baldoni and his team started to speak out, a plausible counter narrative took shape. Twohey, it now seemed, had not been in possession of all the facts, largely because she hadn’t really been interested in obtaining them. Timestamps on some of the art in her NYT piece go back days before Baldoni was ever approached for comment, and some of the text appears to have been archived on the web as far back as October of that year.

There’s nothing remotely unusual about an investigative journalist putting the pieces of an article together before finally publishing it, and there’s nothing unusual about waiting until the last minute to ask a subject for comment. But Lively was cast by Twohey as the sympathetic protagonist in this story, despite a mountain of compelling evidence that she was anything but. In light of the full facts, Twohey’s behavior on the ramp up to her article’s publication looks less like thoroughness and more like the setup of an intentional hit job.

Turned Tables & Missing Pieces

When Twohey’s piece dropped, I was firmly on Team Blake. Then I got shaky when Baldoni sounded defiant in hitting back. Now, I’m so firmly on Team Justin, it’s hard for me to imagine anything changing my mind.

For me to be convinced that Justin Baldoni has been anything but the undeserving victim of a power-hungry, two-faced, dastardly duo, it would have to be revealed that the documentation he’s offered to support his side of the story was straight-up fabricated. Or at minimum, incomplete. He released it all on February 1st though, and so far, no such claims have been made.

Meanwhile, Lively and Reynolds look to have gone to ground (with one, terrible exception). Public opinion has thoroughly turned on them, and even their bff, Taylor Swift, has been suspiciously silent on the matter. Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, publicly promised a lawsuit unlike any other. On this, he seems to have delivered in spades.

I don’t really know what to say about all this in terms of its broader implications. Some have tried to paint the saga as a refutation of #metoo fever, but I’m unconvinced. #metoo saw its share of well-deserved takedowns, and some of what looked like collateral cultural damage. But I don’t recall any #metoo story as nuts as this one.

Really, again, unless Baldoni has simply forged these documents, he wasn’t just the victim of a dubious accusation. He was the victim of a well-structured, carefully executed plot to steal his movie, wreck his career, bankrupt him, and forever destroy his reputation.

Why? Seriously, what did the guy do to deserve this?

In every exchange, even the ones in Lively’s complaint (as soon as context is applied) Justin Baldoni comes across as a f*****g angel. As a man so kind, so generous, and so great to work with, you just kind of want to give him a hug. To do to this poor b*****d what Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds did to him is the moral equivalent of lowering a brand new puppy onto the sidewalk and stomping it to death with a pair of stilettos.

Again: why?

Fans have their theories. Did Baldoni and Lively have an affair? Did they almost have an affair? Does Lively want the rights to the It Ends With Us sequel, It Starts With Us?

It’s certainly plausible, in my view, that the stars’ onscreen romance could have spilled off the screen. I was an actor once upon a time, and I can’t even count the number of relationships I’ve seen made or broken by dramatic chemistry. S**t, my wife and I met onstage. Now that I think on it, I’m not sure I’ve had a single serious relationship that started anywhere else.

So sure, maybe Baldoni and Lively were doing the dirty. Maybe this is all a deflection to either keep the truth from Ryan Reynolds (not to mention Baldoni’s wife). Or maybe it’s about quenching Ryan’s thirst for vengeance against he who planted upon him the horns of the cuckold. It’s hard to know.

But there are two missing pieces in this, and I think their absence is conspicuous. Based on the text exchanges, Baldoni doesn’t appear to have done anything to cause Lively to turn on him. At one point, they’re fine. At the next, she’s lodging complaints, making ridiculous demands, and generally scaring the s**t out of everyone. Turns that sharp don’t usually happen without a catalyst, and it’s just not clear what caused this relationship to sour so profoundly.

On the other hand, the bust-up didn’t happen all at once. Which maybe argues against such a catalyst. But the alternative then is that this was a snow job from the jump. That every gooey, sappy word Lively wrote to Baldoni through the whole process was just a misdirect aimed to give him a false sense of security. Obviously, I know that some people really are that evil. I just really didn’t think that Blake Lively or Ryan Reynolds were going to be two of them. They always seemed so cute and nice!

Another gap in the narrative is the lull between the film’s launch and Meghan Twohey’s NYT boom being lowered. Twohey’s a crack reporter, so maybe I’m wrong here, but it strikes me as unlikely that she scooped this one herself. At minimum, it feels like Lively and Reynolds were eagerly cooperating with her piece, and I get a much stronger vibe that they probably shopped it to her in the first place.

Example from Twohey, re the competing versions of the film:

“In the end, Sony and Wayfarer went with Ms. Lively’s cut, and she got a producer credit.”

Ha!

I wonder how Twohey would have covered the Kennedy assassination.

“In the end, JFK had a bad time in Dallas, where a spectator expressed his disapproval.”

The full story of what actually happened here is so insanely sexy and newsworthy that Twohey’s omission of it can only be explained by her being lazy (which she is not) or by her having been co opted.

Lively had to take extraordinary steps - threatening, withholding, cajoling - even to make her cut of the film. She wasn’t hired as a producer, she wasn’t hired as a director, and she wasn’t hired as a writer. A leading actor demanding access to raw footage in the way she did was regarded as unprecedented by the Wayfarer team. She badgered Sony into letting her make her version, letting her take extra time to do it, then ultimately releasing it despite its relative underperformance with focus groups, all by promising to walk away from the table and leave everyone in the lurch if her terms were not met.

When she was done, a producer credit wasn’t enough to satisfy her. Lively bullied Wayfarer Studios into writing her a letter of recommendation to receive a mark from the Producers’ Guild of America (PGA). This is a serious industry distinction, one not taken lightly, and Wayfarer didn’t want to recommend her since she hadn’t, according to them, done the work to warrant it. Lively wasn’t speaking to Wayfarer except through intermediaries at this point, but Wayfarer regarded their eventual decision to acquiesce to her “unreasonable and cold hearted” demand as their having fallen victim to “extortion.” (These are the actual words used by Wayfarer head, Jamey Heath in a venting letter he sent to his attorney about what Lively had just forced him to do.)

Effectively, Lively had stripped these guys down, bent them over, beaten them across the ass with a paddle, and was now insisting they say, “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another?”

Now, try telling me, with a straight face, that that isn’t a more interesting and newsworthy version of events than Twohey’s “In the end, Sony and Wayfarer went with Ms. Lively’s cut, and she got a producer credit.”

Either Meghan Twohey set out to intentionally make her piece more boring, or she didn’t try very hard to get the other side’s (much spicier) narrative included.

But my real point here, again, is why? Assuming that Lively and Reynolds made a call to Twohey, what did they think it would accomplish? And why bother with the CRD complaint at all? It’s not like they needed the money they’d get from winning or settling.

Opening fire on Justin Baldoni exposed them to all manner of counter litigation, not to mention increased press scrutiny. And they had to know he could produce receipts to defend himself because Lively had most of the receipts too. They were on her damn phone!

One possibility is that they never really intended to fight the CRD complaint in court. That leaking it to NYT was the whole point of the exercise. If so, it was an incredibly stupid (and potentially costly) move.

Claims made in legal filings are generally covered by what’s called litigation privilege. Essentially, if I tell people that you like using your stilettos to stomp on puppies, you can bust me for slandering you. But if I sue you for using your stilettos to stomp puppies, I’m covered, even if the charge is b******t.

Litigation privilege has limits though, and one of them is that it does not reliably cover republications of legal complaints. The exact rules vary from state to state, but there’s a case to be made that by leaking her CRD complaint to the New York Times (if indeed she did), Lively opened herself up to a libel suit in the event she couldn’t substantively defend her claims.

Maybe they thought Baldoni would go down without a fight, or maybe they thought his cancellation would be so swift and total that his ultimate reaction wouldn’t matter. But one wonders if Lively or Reynolds still think this was worth it. They already had what they wanted. Lively got the movie, got the credit, got her co-star frozen out, and could have just moved on. If they hadn’t needed to make sure Baldoni stayed on the mat, they probably could have gotten away with everything.

Conclusions?

Unless some mitigating details come to light - and it’s hard to even imagine what they could be at this point - Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds belong on the same moral plane as Ted Bundy, Queen Mary I, and the bad guy from the first Beethoven movie (ifkyk).

I’m broadly against the practice of “cancellation” except in cases where the IRL behavior is so horrendously inexcusable that I actually can’t take in the artwork anymore without its having been tainted by the artist. And I have extremely loose standards on this. My list is basically Bill Cosby, and….no actually, it’s just Bill Cosby. That’s really it. That’s where the bar is for me. That’s what you have to do in order to make me stop enjoying your otherwise enjoyable art.

At the risk of sounding callous, actor Michael Jace murdered his f*****g wife, and I can still watch his scenes in The Shield without really thinking about it. Picasso was a scumbag to women, Kevin Spacey was a scumbag to men, Lizzo was a scumbag to her staff, and Michael Vick was a scumbag to his pets. I know all this. And I have no trouble gazing at ‘The Old Guitarist,’ replaying The Usual Suspects, rocking out to ‘Juice,’ or watching Falcons highlights. Willingly depriving myself of these pleasures because they were offered to me by bad people always seemed like punishing me for something somebody else did.

But yikes. I just don’t know after this. It’s hard for me to imagine Deadpool or The Town hitting right after knowing what I now [think I] know.

Unless I turn out to be way wrong here - and I’ll say so if that happens - then seriously, f**k Blake Lively. And f**k Ryan Reynolds.

F*****g dicks, man.

Stay tuned, I guess.

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